


THE HOUSE IS NOT HAUNTED

by satelliteinasupernova



Series: Halloween One-shots: Betty/Jughead [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Blood, Creepy, F/M, Fire, Haunted Houses, Horror, Injury, beware the cooper house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 04:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21247598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satelliteinasupernova/pseuds/satelliteinasupernova
Summary: “For the hundredth time, the house is not haunted,” said Gladys Jones as she lifted another box from the U-haul to carry into the house. “Now, go help your brother carry your things to your bedroom.”JB huffed, and marched over to Jughead, reaching for her box of vinyl records, “How else did we get this place so cheap? You know it’s because that girl disappeared here.”Silently, Jughead agreed with her, but he was getting tired of the argument. He knew JB wasn’t bringing this up to stop them from moving into the new house, she just wanted their mom to admit that was the reason they could even afford it. Gladys Jones wasn’t one to own up to her own methods, much less admit weakness.





	THE HOUSE IS NOT HAUNTED

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heartunsettledsoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartunsettledsoul/gifts).

“For the hundredth time, the house is not haunted,” said Gladys Jones as she lifted another box from the U-haul to carry into the house. “Now, go help your brother carry _ your _ things to _ your _ bedroom.”

JB huffed, and marched over to Jughead, reaching for her box of vinyl records, “How else did we get this place so cheap? You know it’s because that girl disappeared here.”

Silently, Jughead agreed with her, but he was getting tired of the argument. He knew JB wasn’t bringing this up to stop them from moving into the new house, she just wanted their mom to admit that was the reason they could even afford it. Gladys Jones wasn’t one to own up to her own methods, much less admit weakness.

“JB,” FP said, as he hauled a piece of a bed frame over his shoulder, “a Jones knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.” JB rolled her eyes in response, but Jughead couldn’t help but now envision this house as a very cozy looking Trojan horse.

The Jones family had been skirting past the fact that Jughead had known the girl who had lived in this house. Betty Cooper had gone to elementary school with him, and had been one of his only two friends at the time. Well, before he had gotten suspended for starting a small fire in a trash can behind the fourth grade classroom. After that, he had been promptly sent back to South side. The school board hadn’t really cared that he had been burning his own notebook after the class bully had written insults in thick black marker all over the cover.

After that, Jughead hadn’t really bothered to maintain his friendship with North siders. 

And yet, here they were, the Jones family, moving in to the North side of town. Jughead glanced over at the neighboring house. He knew Archie still lived there, but he hadn’t spoken to him in years, and he felt weird about approaching him now. He couldn’t help but wonder though, how he felt about Betty’s disappearance. 

It had been six months since she had last been seen. There had been a lot of theories floating around. She had run away from her parents, fallen in love and ditched town, gone into the protective custody of the FBI. Despite all the rumors, general consensus throughout town was that she was dead. They just had to wait for her body to find its way down Sweetwater River. _ Betty Cooper didn’t know how to keep things well enough alone, _ people said. _ She probably poked her head somewhere it didn’t belong. _

Betty had been known for posting critical think pieces in Riverdale High’s student paper. Some of her work gained enough traction that he even heard talk about them at Southside High. Criticisms on town ordinances or school policies. Nothing that would typically get you killed.

Thinking of her now left a pit in his stomach. It hurt to remember her as he knew her back then, with her bright smile and bouncing pigtails, and imagine her now dead and buried somewhere. He preferred to stick to the theory that she had just ditched town for a brighter future.

Even with the bustle of moving day, stepping into the old Cooper house was eerie. He still remembered the layout of the house from when he had visited as a kid. All of the furniture had been cleared out. The walls echoed every time someone spoke.

First born privilege allowed him the right to pick which of the spare bedrooms would be his, so he automatically chose the larger room with its own attached bathroom. JB hadn’t argued. “This is _ her _ room, you know,” she whispered, before walking backwards to her own room across the hall.

Jughead set a box down square in the middle of the room, and took a moment to look around. The walls had been recently painted white. His mom had said it was a huge improvement to the pink wallpaper that had decorated it before. The new paint had the effect of making the room look painfully empty. He honestly couldn’t tell that Betty had ever lived here.

  
  
  
  
  
  


It wasn’t until a few days after they moved in that Jughead saw Archie. He was standing in his front lawn right at the line where Archie’s lawn ended and theirs began. Archie looked like he had been waiting there for a while.

“Hey, man,” Archie said as Jughead walked down the front steps and approached him. “It’s been a long time.”

“Yeah,” Jughead sighed, “I’m sorry if it’s weird… me living here.”

“No,” Archie said quickly, “If it’s gonna be anyone, it might as well be you.” There was a sunken, almost ashen look to Archie’s face that was so unlike him it made him seem like a different person altogether. “Better than some stranger moving in, honestly.”

Jughead just nodded, not sure what to say.

“Anyway,” Archie continued, “If you ever want to come over and play video games or something.” He shrugged. “It would be great to hang out, or whatever.”

Jughead was hit with an overwhelming nostalgia that he hadn’t been prepared for. “Yeah, that’d be great,” he said, stumbling over the words.

“I just,” Archie looked uncomfortably up at the once-Cooper now-Jones home, “I can’t go in that house, you know?”

He knew that, unlike most people he had talked to about the house, this had nothing to do with the prospect of it being haunted. “Yeah, of course,” he said. 

Archie smiled, and turned to walk back to his house, but stopped a few steps away and looked back at him, “Are you going to be back at Riverdale High?”

Jughead briefly thought about answering _ he had never actually been at Riverdale High to begin with _. “Maybe,” and then after a moment admitted, “Probably.”

Archie gave a brief smile, “If anyone gives you trouble, just let me know.” Then he walked back to his house without looking back.

Jughead was reminded of an old memory, suddenly crystal clear even though he hadn’t thought of it in years. One of Archie, ten years old, tackling Reggie Mantle to the ground after he had thrown Jughead’s backpack into a toilet. Betty had been standing nearby, her face bright red in anger, yelling to Reggie all the ways she would make sure he was punished.

After Jughead had transferred schools, Betty had gone by his house a few times to see him. He had shrugged her off each time until finally she had stopped coming.

He regretted that now.

  
  


Gladys had decided that now that they had their own backyard, they were going to start gardening. As a family. It was the kind of pet project Gladys could easily pull FP into, and from there drag Jughead and JB into unwillingly. Like most of her other family projects, Jughead was sure this one wouldn’t last long enough that anything in the garden would even start to sprout.

Jughead didn’t really fight it. He thought that maybe a garden with some blooming flowers might have been something Betty would have liked. That thought turned sour when JB leaned over to him in the middle of building small mounds of dirt to whisper, “Do you think she’d buried here somewhere?”

After that, he didn’t enjoy it so much anymore.

FP had brought home a set of gardening supplies on the back of his truck before they started working on the garden, but hadn’t put much thought into where they were going to store it. The garage was already occupied with two vehicles. Their two motorcycles and motorcycle parts barely fit along the wall by the doorway. At first, they had just left the gardening tools out by the back of the house, but after being stuck multiple times with the job of cleaning out the wheelbarrow after it rained, Jughead decided to just find a sheltered place to keep it.

The house had a basement with a small door that could be reached from the side of the house, but they hadn’t bothered to use it since they moved in. The Joneses just didn’t have enough to fill the house in the first place, and they hadn’t found a need for the additional space.

The basement had its own separate key, and it took awhile for Jughead to finally find it. After trekking through the house, looking through nearly every drawer, he eventually found it with a small set of keys resting on the lid of the circuit breaker in the garage. The key was iron, long with an ornate handle. Unlike the rest of the house, the basement door hadn’t been updated to a modern lock.

After pulling the garden supplies over to the side of the house, Jughead unlocked the door, pulling it open with a rusty, loud screech. Inside, there wasn’t much to see. A few empty shelves against the wall and an old washing machine no one had bothered moving out before the sale. The floor and the walls were both built with brick, worn down by time.

As Jughead dragged the wheelbarrow into the room, its foot scraped across the floor, dragging with it a line of dust and old wood shavings. It revealed a red line on the floor, brighter than the red bricks, a mark where someone had drawn on the floor with paint. Jughead pulled a wet rag out from the wheelbarrow and started wiping down the floor, following the path of the line.

It was quickly apparent that the line formed was a circle, with strange symbols written along it’s margin. It looked like something he would expect to see in a book about Aleister Crowley; the kind of occult that rich people liked to dabble in. 

It made his stomach churn. Had someone obsessed with the occult come in here after Betty had disappeared and painted this? Or had it been here before then?

Jughead didn’t know much about magic circles, but he figured at the very least they probably wouldn’t work if the circle wasn’t complete. He scratched away at the paint with the metal end of a shovel until he managed to scrape a few lines across the mark.

Maybe he could get ahold of some paint remover and scrub the whole floor clean. Betty didn’t deserve this kind of tribute to her disappearance.

If only that was the last weird thing to happen in the house.

He could swear he heard her voice when he slept. Her voice quieter even then the hum of the heat blowing in from the vent near his bed. He would blink awake suddenly in the dark, certain he had heard his name. As soon as he turned on the light on the bedside table, the moment would pass. He would stare at his new bedroom with a painful loneliness deep in his chest.

  


His transfer to Riverdale high had been inevitable. Jughead knew that a part of Gladys’ plan in buying the house was to get her kids in the better funded North side schools. Jughead spent most of his school day blocking out other students with headphones over his ears, and determinedly looking at the ground as he walked the halls. No one had given him any trouble, just wayward stares that he actively ignored. 

Archie had joined him for lunch a few times. He’d try to get Jughead to join at his usual lunch table, but after one glance at the table of jocks and popular kids, Jughead had adamantly declined. Archie tried a few more times before Jughead finally managed to convince him that he liked using lunchtime to write and joining his table would just be a distraction.

He hated to admit it, but he was starting to get used to being at the school. He avoided talking to people in the halls, but there had been a couple engaging conversations in his literature class. The guy who sat next to him, Kevin, was quick to make snappy comments that went completely over the teacher’s head. More than once, Jughead had to catch himself from laughing in class. 

The hardest thing about being at Riverdale high was passing by the small shrine that had been made for Betty. It was placed right next to the large trophy case at the front of the main school hallway. Jughead couldn’t bring himself to look away from it every time he passed it. There she was, sixteen years old and in the Riverdale Vixen’s bright blue and yellow uniform. Her smile was as warm as ever, but he couldn’t help but interpret her expression as a little sad.

“Jughead.”

He nearly jumped in place. He hadn’t even realized he had stopped walking to stare at her picture. Kevin was standing beside him with a thoughtful look on his face.

“You knew Betty, didn’t you?” Kevin asked, looking over at the picture himself. He leaned forward to press his hand against one of the paper flowers next to the picture that had been starting to come loose off of the wall.

“Not really,” Jughead answered quickly, though amended, “not since we were kids.”

“I’m her best friend,” Kevin said without looking at him.

Jughead noticed that Kevin still referred to her in the present tense. He couldn’t keep himself from asking, “Do you know what happened to her?”

“No,” Kevin said solemnly. It was silent between them for a moment before he added, “And if she’d skipped town she would have told me.”

Jughead swallowed, his stomach churning with anxiety. It hadn’t fully hit him, how much easier it was for him, who was now mostly a stranger to Betty, compared to the people in her life. He thought of the haunted look on Archie’s face every time he even looked at her old house. Kevin’s expression now was closed, but Jughead could practically feel the tension radiating from him from where he stood a few feet away.

“We’re going to be late for Chemistry,” Kevin said abruptly, and turned away from the shrine without looking back.

  
  


That night he dreamt about Riverdale high. He was sitting at his regular spot next to Kevin when he felt the presence of someone standing over him. The eraser-side of a pencil poked at his arm.

“That’s my seat, Juggie,” Betty said, indignantly. 

He stood up quickly, “Shit. Sorry, Betts.” He slid into the seat behind her, awkwardly pulling his backpack with him.

“Still the new kid,” Kevin joked.

Something was off about this, but Jughead couldn’t quite place what was wrong.

“Betty,” Kevin half-whispered to her, “They’re going to ask you where you’ve been.”

“No, they won’t,” Betty insisted.

From behind him, Jughead could hear a deep grinding sound, like teeth scraping against teeth. With each unnerving sound, the walls of the classroom started to collapse around them, folding in across the seams. He knew, whatever it was, it was getting closer to them.

“Don’t look,” Betty instructed, still faced toward the front of the class. Bits of the ceiling were crumbling to the floor.

From where he was sitting, he could see her arms were gripping at the sides of her desk.

“Betty,” he said in horror.

“Don’t look,” she repeated.

There were bite marks all over her arms, and they were bleeding openly. As the noise continued, he could see similar bite marks starting to bleed through her shirt.

“Betty,” he said again.

“Don’t-”

Jughead woke with a start. He blinked out at the dark, hardly daring to move. He could swear he could still hear that sound, the heavy gnashing of teeth, the stretch of a mouth. The deep swallowing of a throat.

He reached for his bedside light. His room was still the same. And the sound was gone.

  


After that night, every time he had a dream, Betty was there. Sometimes she would help him, other times she would just be a set piece standing at a distance. With a disturbing frequency, his dream would be interrupted by the sound of something chewing and gnashing from behind him, just out of sight. He knew it was big, larger than he could even imagine.

His dreams were messing with his sleep. He would wake up only once his dad banged against his door. 

He barely bothered to look in the bathroom mirror in the morning, but he knew he looked terrible. His mom would give him a vaguely concerned look as he dragged himself out the door, and he was having trouble just managing to stay awake in class. Even in literature, Kevin had to kick him in the foot to shake him awake more than once.

On his way to lunch, he almost ran into an open locker. A strong hand gripped his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.

“Watch out,” he heard Moose Mason say. Jughead glanced back at him. He didn’t know much about Moose, outside of being one of Archie’s football friends and Kevin’s boyfriend. Unlike most of the football players Archie surrounded himself with, he seemed like a genuinely good guy. So when Moose said, with a concerned look on his face, “Hey, come eat with me and Kevin,” Jughead was almost tempted to say yes.

Almost.

Instead he shook his head and mumbled an excuse about already having plans. From the look on Moose’s face, he clearly didn’t believe him, but he didn’t fight Jughead on it. 

As he skirted away, Jughead thought to himself, maybe he could get away with taking a nap under the stairwell.

  
  


When Jughead got home from school that afternoon, Jellybean didn’t mince words. “You look like shit, Jug.”

“Thanks,” he said, sarcastically. He headed straight for the pantry, pulling out a large bag of chips and reaching for the box of oreos.

Jellybean was still staring at him, biting at her lip thoughtfully. “Mom thinks it’s the school.”

“The school is fine,” he huffed, not really wanting to have this conversation.

There was a pause while Jughead poured himself a cup of juice.

“Is it the house?” JB asked quietly. Jughead felt himself swallow automatically, but he didn’t answer.

“You know I’m just joking,” she tried.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he said, promptly shutting the fridge and marching up to his room with the snacks in hand.

  
  


The next morning, when he stepped into the bathroom, his name was written in thick red lines on the mirror.

“Juggie?” it read. 

He stepped closer, his stomach churning. He ran a finger along the side of a letter. It felt of wax and smudged across the glass. Immediately, he started looking around the bathroom. He checked all over the counter, and then opened each drawer. When he opened the thin drawer just beneath the sink, something rolled forward. The drawer was completely empty save for one tube of lipstick. The cap was off and it left a similar trail of red down the lining of the drawer.

For several minutes, he just stared at the mirror.

From the other side of the room, he heard his bedroom door open. “Hey, Jug! Breakfast is ready,” JB called out.

His mind clicked into place and he felt anger building up inside him. He stepped out of the bathroom so he could face JB. “Did you do this?” he asked, pointing to the bathroom.

JB gave him a confused look, but stepped forward. When she was close enough to see the marks on the mirror, she stopped in her tracks. “What the hell?”

“This isn’t funny, JB” he said gruffly.

She looked back at him in shock. “I didn’t. I wouldn’t,” she insisted. Then she stopped, her expression changing to one of suspicion. “Wait. Is this your way of getting back at me?"

“What,” he said reflexively. 

Now it was her turn to get angry, “I get your point already! I’ll stop making jokes about the house.” She stormed off before Jughead could respond.

Neither of them dared to continue the conversation over breakfast. They both stared down at their food without talking.

“You kids fight or something?” FP asked unhelpfully from across the table.

  


If JB hadn’t written the letters, then who had?

He didn’t dare to believe the small voice in the back of his head that was already certain of the answer.

  


It wasn’t until a week later, when JB was staying over at a friends house for the night, that Jughead felt that he could finally try an experiment. He was confident that this kind of prank wasn’t something his parents would do. It would serve no benefit to Gladys, and FP just didn’t have that kind of creativity. 

So, when JB was away for the night, he set a notebook out on his desk, and placed an open pen next to it, just to see if something like the lipstick message could happen again.

He found himself staring at the open notebook from his position on the bed most of the night. Waiting restlessly for something, anything to happen. It was well into the morning when he started to doze off.

The next thing he knew, sunlight was streaming into his face from the nearby window. He turned his face away, burying his face into his pillow. The memory of his experiment woke him abruptly, and he pushed himself out of bed, his pillow falling to the floor in the process.

He leaned forward to look at the notebook. There was writing there that hadn’t been there the night before.

A message had been left for him in hurried, but clear handwriting.

  


_ Juggie, if you’re reading this... If you’re really here, then you need to get out of this house. _

_ I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m here, but I’m not. I’m just stuck in this house, alone. _

_ The furniture keeps changing, moving, but there’s no one there. Sometimes, I’m sure you’re here, but I can’t see you. _

_ Am I dead? Am I dying? I feel like I’m slowly fading away. Like this house is slowly digesting me, and soon I’ll just be...gone. _

_ I think it’s getting stronger, whatever it is. _

_ Please, Jughead. You need to leave. _  


The handwriting wasn’t JB’s. It didn’t match anyone in his family. Quickly, he pulled a pair of pants on and grabbed the shirt that was hanging over his desk chair. Shoving the notebook under his arm, he marched down the stairs and left the house before his parents could question him.

He was headed for Riverdale High. The school would be open on Saturday morning for sports practices and club gatherings. 

The Blue and Gold had gone dormant after Betty disappeared. It was well known, even to him, that she had been the only one keeping the school newspaper afloat. A few of her articles had made it to South side. Specifically the one that had accused a school board member of taking bribes that had gotten her suspended from school and almost taken off the paper completely. That was until her findings had been proven to be true.

Right now, he was just hoping that the room was unlocked.

Unfortunately for him, when he got there, the door was locked shut. He peered into the room with one hand covering his view of the glass to block out any reflections. The room was littered with boxes. It had clearly been thoroughly dismantled by the investigation team after her disappearance, and nothing had been unpacked since. Jughead tried forcing the lock on the door, but the sound echoed through the empty hall. He would have to find another way in. 

He walked around the outside of the building until he found the windows on the outside of the room. He’d have to climb to reach them, but luckily, the room was facing the woods out behind the school, where no one was likely to see him. He gripped onto a side panel, and pushed himself up so that he was sitting on the edge of the windowsill. 

As expected, the windows were locked, but at least here he felt comfortable taking out his pocket knife and breaking the lock from the outside. Careful to be quiet, he pulled the window up and set his feet down on the floor inside.

The room clearly hadn’t been touched in a while. A thin layer of dust had settled on the ancient computer monitors. There were streaks in the dust along the desk at the front of the room where several boxes had been piled up. Jughead lifted the lid off of the nearest one and dug a hand in to sift through the contents. Old issues of the Blue and Gold. He moved on. 

He had searched through several boxes before he finally found one that looked promising. It was full of miscellaneous papers, barely organized. They were sectioned off into categories by thin manilla folders. Halfway through one stack of papers, he stopped. It was a loose sheet of paper with handwritten notes detailing interviews about student thoughts on recent revisions to the school dress code. At the top of the sheet, Betty had filled out her name and the date.

Jughead leaned back to reach for where he had set the notebook he had brought from home. He laid the notebook out next to the loose sheet of paper.

The handwriting was unmistakably the same.

  
  
  


After that, he tried leaving notes for her around the house. He would talk out loud when he was sure no one would overhear him. He would even read out his homework sitting at the desk where he had gotten her response.

Nothing seemed to work. He hadn’t gotten a message from her since. She barely even showed up in his dreams anymore.

He would have started to believe he had made the whole thing up, it he didn’t have the very real proof of the message she had left.

He started to explore more of the house. The strange magic circle in the basement concerned him. He had thought about scrubbing it off the floor completely, but he didn’t know enough about it to be sure if that would help Betty or just make things worse.

He tried searching through the occult section of Riverdale’s library, had even checked out a few on _ speaking with the dead _. After a thorough reading, Jughead decided that the writers knew just as little about the occult as he did.

After weeks of no further traces of Betty, a sense of dread was starting to settle into his bones. He hated being at the house, but he worried when he left. He knew that Betty needed his help, but didn’t know how.

He still wasn’t sleeping well.

It was in the afternoon, as he was dozing off in the living room while JB was off at soccer practice, that he was shaken abruptly by a blood chilling scream.

As he jumped to his feet, the house shuddered underneath him. The books on the shelf beside him tumbled over, sending a small clock they had been using as a book stop tumbling to the floor.

“Betty?” he yelled.

The voice had come from above, so he ran up the stairs taking two steps at a time.

Along the hallway outside the bedroom were thick marks, letters scratched into the side of the wall with a pen.

NO, it said

Then,

PLEASE GO 

The letters were along the wall as though someone had been writing them as they were dragged physically down the hall by their legs.

“Betty?” he yelled again. He followed the trail of lettering. It was barely words anymore, just deep hashes of lines again and again into the wall, onto the floor.

The marks stopped at the door to the attic.

Jughead forced the door open and ran up the rickety wooden steps.

Jughead had been in the attic a few times. Mostly to put any holiday decorations in storage. He’d searched it in his attempts to speak with Betty, but hadn’t found anything spookier than creaky boards and spider webs.

The attic had changed since then. The paneling on the far wall was stretching in gruesome ways, like a mouth that had been sewn shut. With each movement, the room shook. It would stretch wide and then close again in a steady chewing motion.

“Betty!” he screamed out, raising his voice as loud as he could.

It was so quiet that he almost didn’t hear it, but from behind the mouth of _ the thing _, he could hear her say his name.

He rushed forward, gripping the wood paneling with his nails, but couldn’t get it to budge. It was like trying wrestling open a wolf’s mouth while its jaw was clenched tight.

Jughead let go and took a deep breath. He used the moment to think of an alternative. He remembered seeing an axe out behind the Andrews’ house after Fred had stopped by the house with some firewood for them to use in the living room fireplace.

Jughead didn’t let himself spend anymore time thinking. He ran. Down both flights of stairs and out the kitchen door. The axe was right where he’d last seen it.

Archie was out front, strumming on a guitar, but Jughead didn’t take the time to stop.

“Jug. What are you-?” As Archie sat up, a discordant note rang from his guitar.

Jughead grabbed the axe with one hand, and turned and ran without looking back.

When he finally made it back to the attic, his breath was haggard. He took the axe in both hands and ran the sharp blade into the wall.

Blood started to burst out of the wood panel he had cracked open. Bile hit his throat. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.

“Betty?” he yelled, terrified.

There was a bang from the other side of the wall. “I’m here, Jug,” she yelled back, her voice muffled but still recognizable, “Keep going!”

With a breath of relief, Jughead gripped his hands around the axe again.

He swung, again and again. With each cut to the wood, more blood poured out onto the floor. The house was shaking so hard now that Jughead could barely stay steady on his feet.

Finally, with one heavy swing, a large crack splintered across the wall. From the other side, a panel was pushed forward, creating an open gap. A hand came through, fingers caked in blood, skin almost deathly pale. He tugged along the opening to help break off more paneling. When there was enough of a gap to put both of his arms through, he reached in and wrapped his arms around her body.

With one foot planted against the wall, he pulled her free. Both of them tumbled to the floor as the wall stretched and cracked. The splintering of the wood almost sounded like a scream.

In his arms, Betty was solid, her body still warm. Her hair was a mess of tangles, caked with blood.

Her hair that had always been a beautiful golden blonde had become a muddy gray, as if all the color had been drained from it. There were dark bags under her eyes, even more prominent that his own. Still, it was Betty, even now recognizable as the girl he used to watch from the other side of Pop’s as she talked with her friends in her cheerleading uniform.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

They were both unsteady on their feet. Betty had to lean her weight onto him in order to stand. Once she was up, however, she reached over to the axe.

“No,” she said. “We have to kill it.”

“Betty.” He reached out for her, but she had already lifted the axe back and swung hard at the wall.

Jughead’s feet slid across the blood-soaked floor, but he pushed himself to make one more run down to the bottom floor. In the living room, the TV had come completely loose off of the wall and dishes had collapsed from the kitchen cabinets down to the counter.

Jughead stepped around the broken pieces and opened a side drawer where they kept the matches. On his way back around the kitchen, he reached up for the tallest cabinet where he knew his dad kept the liquor. Luckily, the bottles hadn’t fallen down yet. He grabbed the nearest bottle and ran back up to the attic.

Betty had cut into the gap so much that it opened all the way down to the floor. It looked even more like a jagged, gruesome mouth than it had before. Blood was spurting out in large bubbles around the edges of the opening.

He took hold of Betty’s shoulder and pulled her back. He could see that her legs were shaking and she was barely managing to keep herself upright. Leaning her against his shoulder, he tugged at his shirt, pulling off a strip of fabric from under the sewn lining. He stuffed the fabric into the bottle of alcohol and lit it on fire.

He threw the bottle against the wall with a satisfying crack.

He didn’t take time to watch the damage. He threw Betty’s arm over his shoulder and dragged them both down the stairs and through the front door.

They barely made it to the lawn before his legs gave out from under him.

He could hear the crackling of the fire as it started to grow. Under the building flames, there was an echo of a moan, deep and pained.

When they had collapsed, Betty had fallen into his lap, so he pulled his arms around her and rocked her softly. It was a few seconds before either of them noticed Archie walking towards them.

“Jug?” he questioned, and then with a start he yelled, “Betty!” He ran toward them, pulling them both into a rough, tight hug.

As they were pulled into Archie’s arms, Jughead was surprised to hear Betty laugh. The sound seemed to break open something in all of them, because they were soon, all three of them, gripping each other tightly, crying.


End file.
